Lady Bears in uncharted territory against UNC

Associated Press

Published 6:00 pm, Saturday, March 26, 2005

Now it's the North Carolina women's turn.

Just like Connecticut a year ago, the Tar Heels could win both of college basketball's biggest prizes. The men made it to the Final Four by beating Wisconsin on Sunday. The North Carolina women can do the same with a victory over Baylor in the Tempe Regional final Monday night.

The matchup of the No. 1-seeded Tar Heals and No. 2-seeded Lady Bears should be a showcase of how athletically gifted and skilled the young women who play basketball have become.

"You're going to see tremendous athletes. You're going to see unbelievable speed and quickness," Baylor coach Kim Mulkey-Robertson said. "You're going to see unbelievable leaping ability. You're going to see girls that grew up playing the game with guys."

Both teams are 30-3 and riding long winning streaks _ North Carolina 16 games and Baylor a school-record 17. Both teams love to run, both play tough defense, both are strong inside.

"I think it shows where the game is now, the skill level, the abilities of the players, the style of play, the coaching, the ability of players to shoot the basketball," North Carolina coach Sylvia Hatchell said. "The game's come a long way."

Hatchell is 684-265 in 19 seasons at North Carolina, but is in a regional final for only the third time. Her 1998 team lost to eventual national champion Tennessee, her 1994 team, with Marion Jones at point guard, won the national title.

Baylor has never made it this far in the tournament, but in just five years Mulkey-Robertson has built a strong program that reflects her own intensely competitive personality.

As a player, she helped Louisiana Tech win two national titles, and was part of the U.S. Olympic gold medal team in 1984.

She was an assistant at Louisiana Tech for 15 years, helping the school win three more national championships and assuming she would take over when longtime coach Leon Barmore retired. She was offered the job, but the money was far less than she could have gotten had she accepted several big-time coaching positions she turned down over the years. Louisiana Tech also didn't give her the five-year deal she wanted.

So she left on sour terms to take over the downtrodden Baylor program.

"I keep in contact with a lot of friends at Louisiana Tech," Mulkey-Robertson said. "I've not talked to Coach Barmore since I left there. He's left two messages on my cell phone after a basketball game."

Baylor has little athletic heritage. The track program of coach Clyde Hart has produced Olympic gold medalists Michael Johnson and Jeremy Wariner. But the school probably is best remembered for a men's basketball player accused of killing a teammate in 2003.

So an NCAA women's basketball championship would be a very big deal.

"As a university and a community in Waco, we've got so many people behind us," guard Chameka Scott said. "They just love to see us bring some goodness to Baylor. To become a powerhouse, and just what we've come from and what we've become, is a lot of fun to watch."

Mulkey-Robertson's job got a lot easier when she found Sophia Young, who came to the United States from the West Indies as an exchange student age 15. Through some connections, she heard about Young, went to see her play a high school game at Shreveport and could see a raw talent with tremendous potential.

"She's a great player and a great athlete," Hatchell said. "When I saw her jump last night, I was wondering if she was ever going to come back down. She can just jump over the rest of the defense and shoot her shot. There is no way to stop that. She jumps higher than anyone I've seen this year."

Young's mother came from the West Indies and watched her play for the first time on Saturday night.

"She thought I was pretty good," Young said.

The Tar Heels had to overcome a hostile crowd to beat Arizona State on its home floor 79-72 on Saturday night. On Sunday, the North Carolina women watched in their locker room and rooted the men's team on to victory. Three of the women date players on the men's team.

The men and women play the same North Carolina, up-tempo style.

"We're just a run-and-gun team," said the Tar Heels' 5-foot-6, ever-energized playmaker Ivory Latta, who scored 20 on Saturday. "Everybody can run."